


Partners in Science

by Goonlalagoon



Category: Leagues and Legends - E. Jade Lomax
Genre: Gen, friendship fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-25
Updated: 2018-01-25
Packaged: 2019-03-09 11:07:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13480203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goonlalagoon/pseuds/Goonlalagoon
Summary: Grey rubbed his nose thoughtfully, spreading ink over its already ink-stained tip, staring absently at the bottom of the empty bunk above him. Laney, though to all appearances deeply buried in the page of notes she was reviewing ahead of her end of year exams at Jack’s unused desk, flicked an eyebrow up a curious, restrained inch.“What’s on your mind, pipsqueak?” Grey blinked.“Um…lots of things? I’m a sage.”





	Partners in Science

**Author's Note:**

> Way back in the summer, I asked for fic prompts and mizeliza requested something with Laney and Grey. Fast forward a few months, and here we are…

Grey rubbed his nose thoughtfully, spreading ink over its already ink-stained tip, staring absently at the bottom of the empty bunk above him. Laney, though to all appearances deeply buried in the page of notes she was reviewing ahead of her end of year exams at Jack’s unused desk, flicked an eyebrow up a curious, restrained inch.

“What’s on your mind, pipsqueak?” Grey blinked.  
“Um…lots of things? I’m a _sage_.” She sighed pointedly, and he snickered. “But mostly experiments.” She waved a hand in a ‘keep going’ way, though her attention was still half on the page. “Magework experiments, actually.” She added a final note and set her pen aside to show she was listening. “I mean, I’m ridiculously powerful when it comes to the Elsewhere, and you’ve got such low sensitivity you’re practically off the other end of the scale.”

Laney’s interested look morphed into more of a glare, so he gulped and scrambled to get the rest of his thoughts in order.  
“So I think that it will take longer for a bit of fire - of fixed size, and I’d need to find a way to quantify that for consistency, which could be tricky - I guess we could eyeball it to begin with but that feels so inaccurate - anyway. We’ve got lots and lots of studies to show that people with greater affinity for the Elsewhere are stronger mages - I said stronger, not better, stop planning to feed me to a kraken. But I don’t think there’s ever been a study into the rates at which power from the Elsewhere dissipates, depending on the level of sensitivity.” Laney tilted her head to the side, considering, then shrugged.  
“Huh. Yeah, okay, what’s your idea for testing this? And Pip? I can get a bit of power in exact quantities without _thinking_ about it, don’t insult me.”

For the whole of the journey to the mountains, until he slept through Laney’s return and woke with anti-mage wards turning his world aching and twisted, Grey puzzled over experiments and pondered aloud whenever his friends were paying attention. It was an interesting distraction, from the destination and the ever present whisper that Laney didn’t really know what she was up against, slipping in and out of Spider’s clutches as though she wasn’t in any danger at all.

Laney thought about their planned experiments too, when she wasn’t cataloguing conversations and looking for weaknesses, when her fingers itched to bring fire down on her captors and burn through the strings holding elsewhere stones around all their necks. She curled up and pretended she could only breathe in shuddering, pained gasps, and wondered and hypothesised, writing academic abstracts on the backs of her eyelids.

In the long nights at Challenge, when they’d covered every possibility for finding Rupert seven times over and were no closer to sleep, they compared notes. Grey chattered about his findings so far, and Laney flicked a ball of fire from hand to hand while he kept careful count. They couldn’t discuss it on the route home, because Thorne was watching, but they sat shoulder to shoulder around their evening campfires anyway, gears spinning in both their heads.

In St John’s Port, Grey found her in an unused side room in the library on an otherwise unremarkable afternoon, because he’d spotted her slipping in and was a nosey little pipsqueak. She didn’t start guiltily when he pushed his way in, just looked up at him levelly as he stared. She still thought the fear hiding in the stiffness of his shoulder was because he’d spent his life running from being fed into the gaping metal maws drawn out in the harsh, beautiful blueprints scattered on the table before her.

Then he picked up a piece of chalk and started correcting some of her calculations, fingers barely trembling. He tapped his chin and scrawled ideas, matching things up to the memory of his father’s laboratory, of cold metal under his palms. They ran experiments in the hidden safety of his and Jack’s flat, Grey secure in his protective wards and taking notes in spider-splatter scrawl as Laney split the world open again and again.

When George stumbled her way in, Laney did look a little guilty. Ending this had been Georgie’s life, where Laney had known that Grey loved few things as much as a puzzle to solve that involved science and precise columns of calculations. She had watched his shoulders relax and thought it was just academic enjoyment and delight at their (painfully slow) progress. She watched his shoulders hunch higher than they ever had when he first crept in once George pulled up a chair, listened to his stubborn silence, puzzled and aching, and started letting imperfections fall from her lips to draw him back from whatever cold hollow he was drawing himself down into.

Laney didn’t know that Grey had grown up in a world where people bowed to him and stood aside to let him pass in the hall, even when he had been a child. She sighed and rolled her eyes at his utter inability to take care of himself, shoving food into his hands as they worked, and he had squirmed under the attention with grudging gratitude. She had learnt this from Rupert, mostly, but she’d also been the daughter of the camp lead. She was used to the thought that she would be responsible for the wellbeing of those around her. So maybe she hadn’t learnt it from Rupert, after all - maybe from Rupert she had learnt that sometimes that was an act of choice, not an obligation written into the very skin of her.

Grey had grown up pampered and spoilt, hiding from everyone except his sister because attention was the last thing he wanted. Attention meant people noticing him, watching him, and the only person it was safe to let see him had been the Seeress, for so many years. But he had grown into Jack’s concern and Rupert’s lists, the way Laney went sharp but shoved cereal bars into his hand even while she seethed. Jack and Laney disappeared into the mountains and Grey felt homesick, though he pretended it was just sleep deprivation and the Elsewhere storms echoing in his bones. He hauled himself to the kitchen, thinking even I can’t screw up rice, it’s boiling water and absorption rates, and scooped great handfuls of grains into the pot.

He may not have been allowed into the kitchens of his childhood, but Grey had seen rice spooned onto his plate plenty of times over his life even before the Academy, and knew the rough quantities of a portion - but it puffed up a lot more than he expected, so when he was done there was enough to feed six.

If Grey had had to choose a time, place, and way for another of his friends to discover just how much of his life had been a lie, he would have struggled. He had been struggling with it - blackmail in Thorne’s hands, the way Laney scowled when she was the last to know things, the way this was welling up in his throat and threatening to choke him. He would not have chosen for his sister to spit it at her, cool and calm, Rupert hovering at her side looking far more touched by their ordeal than the Seeress unless you knew how to read the strain in the straightness of her spine and the precision of her smirk - and Grey was the only one who could, nowadays.

(Except for Jack, perhaps, but - Jack didn’t care about how captivity had treated Cassandra Graves, he just cared about keeping everyone else safe from her grasp)

Laney hadn’t known, so she had spirited the Seeress away, hands shaking on a gun she was rapidly deciding never to draw. She had walked past the patch of floor she had lain out on, and paused for three deep breaths. In the end, she hadn’t kept walking because she had a job to do, or even because she thought this might get her closer to finding Rupert. She had thought about all of the fire being ripped from her, and about how she and Grey had been pouring over the schematics for that mage damping device, trying to calculate how it ripped the fire away from its source, and she had put one foot in front of the other and kept walking.

If Grey had had to choose a time or place, he would have said _never_ and _nowhere_ \- he would have thought _anywhere_ and _in the past,_ so he could know that Laney would still throw sparks from hand to hand while he kept careful count when she knew his family tree.

When Laney ported back to their apartments from their roadside stopovers, she fetched packs and emptied cupboards, and hauled out the case of blueprints, notes, and careful prototypes.

They didn’t manage to make it work until they were in Rivertown, deciphering notes they didn’t remember writing from before other priorities took firmer hold. They stared at each other in the harsh white light. Grey licked his lips, nervous and excited and relieved.

It might never amount to anything - it may never be efficient enough, or sustainable, or cheap enough - but it was something, and it felt rather like anything was possible, right then.  
“Well, Miss Jones. Ready to change the world?” She grinned, eyes bright and hard.  
“That’s ‘ready to change the world _again’_ , thank you very much, pipsqueak. C’mon, keep count.”


End file.
